THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF JOSEPH CONRAD. Джозеф Конрад
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D'Hubert made no answer.
"Is your cause good at least?"
"I am innocent."
This time he seized the Chevalier's ghostly arm above the elbow, gave it a mighty squeeze.
"I must kill him," he hissed, and opening his hand strode away down the road.
The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the general perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest. He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open his lips, he would break out into horrible imprecation, start breaking furniture, smashing china and glasses. From the moment he opened the private door, and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of winding staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated madman, with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, played inconceivable havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed dining room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over, and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs of the chairs as he crossed the room to reach a low and broad divan on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still greater. That brutality of feeling, which he had known only when charging sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognise in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. It was the revolt of jeopardised desire. In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared, fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having, perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.
On that night General D'Hubert, either stretched on his back with his hands over his eyes or lying on his breast, with his face buried in a cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at the absurdity of the situation, dread of the fate that could play such a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, doubt of his own fitness to conduct his existence and mistrust of his best sentiments—for what the devil did he want to go to Fouché for?—he knew them all in turn. "I am an idiot, neither more nor less," he thought. "A sensitive idiot. Because I overheard two men talk in a café... I am an idiot afraid of lies—whereas in life it is only truth that matters."
Several times he got up, and walking about in his socks, so as not to be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous force of a relentless fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the honourable man's fear of cowardice.
But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D'Hubert had the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder. Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a slight faintness.
He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which made him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors, was gradually asserting itself. It was like going into battle. Arriving at the edge of the wood he sat down on a boulder, holding the other orange in his hand, and thought that he had come ridiculously early on the ground. Before very long, however, he heard the swishing of bushes, footsteps on the hard ground, and the sounds of a disjointed loud conversation. A voice somewhere behind him said boastfully, "He's game for my bag."
He thought to himself, "Here they are. What's this about game? Are they talking of me?" And becoming aware of the orange in his hand he thought further, "These are very good oranges. Leonie's own tree. I may just as well eat this orange instead of flinging it away."
Emerging from a tangle of rocks and bushes, General Feraud and his seconds discovered General D'Hubert engaged in peeling the orange. They stood still waiting till he looked up. Then the seconds raised their hats, and General Feraud, putting his hands behind his back, walked aside a little way.
"I am compelled to ask one of you, messieurs, to act for me. I have brought no friends. Will you?"
The one-eyed cuirassier said judicially:
"That cannot be refused."
The other veteran remarked:
"It's awkward all the same."
"Owing to the state of the people's minds in this part of the country there was no one I could trust with the object of your presence here," explained General D'Hubert urbanely. They saluted, looked round, and remarked both together:
"Poor ground."
"It's unfit."
"Why bother about ground, measurements, and so on. Let us simplify matters. Load the two pairs of pistols. I will take those of General Feraud and let him take mine. Or, better still, let us take a mixed pair. One of each pair. Then we will go into the wood while you remain outside. We did not come here for ceremonies, but for war. War to the death. Any ground is good enough for that. If I fall you must leave me where I lie and clear out. It wouldn't be healthy for you to be found hanging about here after that."
It appeared after a short parley that General Feraud was willing to accept these conditions. While the seconds were loading the pistols he could be heard whistling, and was seen to rub his hands with an air of perfect contentment. He flung off his coat briskly, and General D'Hubert took off his own and folded it carefully on a stone.
"Suppose you take your principal to the other side of the wood and let him enter exactly in ten minutes from now," suggested General D'Hubert calmly, but feeling as if he were giving directions for his own execution. This, however, was his last moment of weakness.
"Wait! Let us compare watches first."
He pulled out his own. The officer with the chipped nose went over to borrow the watch of General Feraud. They bent their heads over them for a time.
"That's it. At four minutes to five by yours. Seven to, by mine."
It was the cuirassier who remained by the side of General D'Hubert, keeping his one eye fixed immovably on the white face of the watch he held in the palm of his hand. He opened his mouth wide, waiting for the beat of the last second, long before he snapped out the word:
"Avancez!"
General D'Hubert moved on, passing from the glaring sunshine of the Provençal morning into the cool and aromatic shade of the pines. The ground was clear between the reddish trunks, whose multitude, leaning at slightly different angles, confused his eye at first. It was like going into battle. The commanding quality of confidence in himself woke up in his breast. He was all to his affair. The problem was how to kill his adversary. Nothing short of that would free him from this imbecile nightmare. "It's no use wounding that brute," he thought. He was known as a resourceful officer. His comrades, years ago, used to call him "the strategist." And it was a fact that he could think in the presence of the enemy, whereas Feraud had been always a mere fighter. But a dead shot, unluckily.
"I must draw his fire at the greatest possible range," said General D'Hubert to himself.
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